While anxiously trying to find a free method of crushing the specialty grains that I accidently brought home uncrushed I found an old hand crank meat grinder handed down from my father in law.

I found that if I kept the grinder and hopper plumb full from start to finish then with only one pass I would end up with a pretty even blend of flour, chopped up grains, and whole grains.

I brew w/extracts and am only using the grains to steep before my boil. Will the flour make my beer bitter? Will the still uncrushed grains go to waste? Should I just double bag or toss out the grains altogether?

Play with the settings, my mom in law uses a meat grinder like your discribeing to turn dried corn into corn meal when I asked her about it she sayed she had to play with the adjustments to achieve the desired results.

I did fiddle around with it some. My grinder has two different metal plates for controlling the size for the chunks of meat that come out the end. The plate with little sized holes, which I tried first, has numerous holes and each just big enough for a whole barley grains to pass through, while the plate with larger holes has about 6 or so holes and could have whole corn kernels pass through it.

When using the plate with little holes, I got flour and some blisters! It was extremly difficult to move any amount of grain through the grinder on that setting. With the large holed plate, a lot of grain just falls through it, but when you keep the grinder and hopper jam packed the success improves a little, giving some crunch without having to break your arm grinding the whole shabang into dust.

It would be neat to find out if there's something on the market that could convert the meat grinder into a grain mill. Seems like with all removable/replaceable parts that would have been common practice 100 years ago. That is, assuming that was a time before people would be concerned about raw meat ending up in their flour.